"Meltdown as 'Speed Bump': The Nuclear Gang Regroups"

Beyond Nuclear board of directors member and investigative journalist Karl Grossman has just exposed a "Nuclear Renaissance" friendly summit in Washington, D.C. where the Fukushima catastrophe was regarded as a "speed bump" on the road to an expansion of atomic energy. His article is posted at Counterpunch.

A frightful question: what would the Fort Peck Dam's failure mean for Nebraska's atomic reactors?!

Bernard Shanks, an adviser to the Resource Renewal Institute, has studied the six main-stem Missouri River dams for more than four decades. He has worked for the U.S. Geological Survey and served as director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. He has written three books on public land policy and is completing a book on the hazards of the Missouri River dams. In a guest commentary entitled "The looming Missouri dam flood," published at stltoday.com on June 7th, Shanks warns that "The Fort Peck Dam is built with a flawed design that has suffered a well-known fate for this type of dam — liquefaction — in which saturated soil loses its stability." He adds that "It may be the largest at-risk dam in the nation." He concludes that "There is a possibility a failure of Fort Peck Dam could lead to a domino-like collapse of all five downstream dams. It probably would wreck every bridge, highway, pipeline and power line and split the heartland of the nation, leaving a gap 1,500 miles wide. Countless sewage treatment plants, toxic waste sites and even Superfund sites would be flushed downstream. The death toll and blow to our economy would be ghastly." To his nightmare list, of course, could be added Nebraska's Fort Calhoun and Cooper atomic reactors, as well as the radioactive West Lake Landfill in St. Louis.

NIRS' Michael Mariotte on "Between the Lines" re: AP's exposés on "Aging Nukes"

Scott Harris of the weekly radio newsmagazine "Between the Lines" interviews Michael Mariotte, executive director of Nuclear Information and Resource Service, on the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, flooding at Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant in Nebraska, and AP's recent exposés on aging atomic reactors in the U.S.

"Nuclear catastrophe imminent in Nebraska? Negligence and cover-ups at Ft. Calhoun reactor"

Joseph Giambrone has a few questions for Omaha Public Power District and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in his Counterpunch article. Giambrone cited a June 24th New York Times/ClimateWire article by Peter Behr, "A Nuclear Plant's Flood Defenses Trigger a Yearlong Regulatory Confrontation," which reports that OPPD resisted NRC and even Army Corps of Engineers warnings and pressure to upgrade flood defenses for years on end, only recently doing so; the upgrades have yet to be evaluated, but are being severely tested by the rising floodwaters of the Missouri River.

"Back-cutting" erosion risks structural integrity of Big Bend Dam upstream of Fort Calhoun on Missouri

Eco In the Know reports that the force of water flowing from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-controlled Big Bend Dam, upstream of the inundated Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant near Omaha on the historically flooded Missouri River, could put the dam at risk:

"Big Bend Dam, South Dakota.  The Missouri is flowing through the emergency spillway at Big Bend Dam.  The water shooting through the spillway gates is moving so fast and with such erosive power that it is back-cutting toward the earthen dam itself.  Left unchecked, the water could threaten the structural integrity of the dam.  Although at present, that scenario is highly unlikely.  Nonetheless, the Army is concerned about the erosion.  To address the issue, a dump truck hauled large blocks of quarried stone to the trouble spot.  The Army plans on dropping the rock atop the eroded bank sections to halt the back-cutting.  A civilian working for the Army acknowledged that the engineers did not expect to be in this predicament when they first opened the spillway gates to the Missouri’s floodwaters.  The back-cutting caught the Army by surprise.  But the military is on top of the problem, with tons of pink Sioux quartzite."

Arnie Gundersen at Fairewinds Associates has warned about the risk of an "inland tsunami" overwhelming Ft. Calhoun if an upstream dam fails.